Couple Banned Over Art Dispute Adds to Carnival’s Woes

Cruise lines sometimes ban
passengers who get drunk, start fights or commit other mayhem.
Ware and Lisa Cornell say their vice was buying a couple of
lithographs.

The Weston, Florida, couple is asking U.S. regulators to
force Carnival Corp. to reimburse it $33,100 for lost deposits
and legal fees after, they say, the company banned them for life
from three of its cruise lines for suing a Carnival unit over
an on-board art purchase.

The complaint adds to the burdens facing Miami-based
Carnival, the world’s biggest cruise operator, whose crippled
Triumph ship arrived in Alabama last night after stranding more
than 3,100 customers for four days with overflowing toilets in
the Gulf of Mexico.

“You can throw people off cruise ships if they’re security
risks; you can throw them off if they misbehave,” Ware Cornell,
62, a trial lawyer, said in a telephone interview. Carnival
“wanted to retaliate against my wife and against me because of
the suit, which was a commercial suit against a related company.
That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

The Cornells complained to the Federal Maritime Commission,
a five-member independent regulator used to dealing with disputes
between companies over cargo rates and other business agreements.
The complaint was filed Jan. 30 and first appeared on the
commission’s public docket yesterday.

‘Novel, Exciting’

“This is kind of a novel, exciting case for the
commission,” said Jennifer Gartlan, the commission’s deputy
director of consumer affairs and dispute resolution. She
declined to discuss details of the case because it’s pending.

Vance Gulliksen, a spokesman for Carnival, declined to
comment. Carnival has dropped 4.3 percent since Feb. 12, the day
after the Triumph was scheduled to return to port in Galveston,
Texas. Carnival says it carried 9.8 million passengers last
year, 46 percent of the 21.2 million worldwide passenger total,
according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission.

The Cornells’ saga started six years ago when Lisa Cornell,
cruising with her sister on the Carnival Imagination, spent more
than $5,000 to buy two pieces of lithograph artwork for her
husband to celebrate their first anniversary.

The salesperson and the cruise’s on-ship newsletter said
on-board art purchases came with a full money-back guarantee,
Lisa Cornell said.

Fraud Worries

When she returned to land, Lisa Cornell changed her mind
after reading about fraudulent cruise-ship art sales. She was
told $585, or 15 percent of the purchase price, would be kept as
a commission under the buying contract, she said.

Ware Cornell, as his wife’s lawyer, sued Global Fine Arts,
a Carnival unit that was the ship’s art vendor. Carnival lawyers
defended the case, according to the Cornells’ complaint with the
maritime commission.

The lawsuit was settled. Before that happened, Lisa Cornell
traveled on the Princess Grand Princess with her mother and put
down a $100 deposit for a future trip while at sea.

Lisa Cornell said when she went online to book that trip,
she was blocked from doing so. She said she later learned, from
a lawyer involved in the art dispute, that she and her husband
had been banned from Carnival-owned Princess, Cunard and P&O
Cruises Australia lines by a company attorney.

“I’m not taking it lying down,” Lisa Cornell, 53, said in
a telephone interview yesterday. “I think this violates public
policy. I don’t think we should encourage companies who operate
as common carriers to ban people willy-nilly just because they
file a lawsuit.”

Still Cruising

The Cornells may have to wait a while for a resolution. The
commission can take “a couple years” if the case winds through
its complete process involving an administrative law judge and a
decision by the commission, Gartlan said.

In the meantime, the couple isn’t letting the spat ruin
their cruising fun. They took a 10-day cruise in October and a
three-day jaunt in January, and have another 10-day trip
scheduled for next October, Ware Cornell said.

The most recent cruise photos on his Facebook page show the
couple enjoying themselves on Holland America -- whose parent
company is Carnival.